I have a theory on how the PS5 Pro could actually outclass PCs

Without a doubt, the PlayStation 5 Pro is the most powerful game console we’ve ever seen. It’s set to launch next week, promising “45% faster rendering” on the back of a beefier graphics card and faster memory. It won’t be enough to outclass a proper gaming desktop packing one of the best graphics cards — not even close. But the PS5 Pro could have an edge over PCs in one area.

I say “could” because we really don’t know. AMD pointed me to Sony, and Sony hasn’t returned my request for comment about the specifics under the hood of the PS5 Pro. I have some hints, however, and if you’ll indulge a little speculation, I have some interesting theories about how the PS5 Pro might have an edge over even powerful gaming PCs.

The PS5 Pro’s secret weapon

Some context is important here. There are three pillars of the PS5 Pro’s performance, according to Sony — a faster GPU, better ray tracing, and AI-assisted upscaling through PSSR. We know all about that stuff, but it doesn’t exactly give the PS5 Pro an upper hand over PCs.

But Sony’s lead systems architect, Mark Cerny, has said there’s another aspect of the PS5 Pro that Sony isn’t highlighting in press releases. The engineer has hinted that the PS5 Pro has ray tracing features that “no other AMD GPUs” have yet. It’s got a trick up its sleeve, so to speak.

There’s a lot to break down in a quote like that. Cerny is referring to ray tracing features, and in a way that’s not bound to specific games, but specific graphics cards. He’s not talking about ray-traced ambient occlusion or reflections — modern AMD GPUs can handle those. Rather, it seems like Cerny is referring to rendering features that otherwise aren’t available on desktop AMD graphics cards, even those as powerful as the RX 7900 XTX.

Now, Sony says the PS5 Pro will be able to boost or stabilize the performance of over 8,500 games, but just shy of 90 games have proper PS5 Pro enhancements, at least at the time of writing. That means a large swath of games will see a performance uplift purely from the larger GPU, but developers need to do some level of work specifically to “enhance” their games for the PS5 Pro. It seems those enhancements largely center around better ray tracing and PSSR.

Those two facts are important to keep in mind. The PS5 Pro has ray tracing features that no AMD graphics card currently has, and at least some of those features require specific developer integration for full support. With those established, we can move onto the fun stuff — denoising.

The importance of denoising

Don’t expect Sony to talk about denoising with the PS5 Pro. It doesn’t get in the weeds like that. But the PS5 Pro is a console that’s packing “advanced ray tracing,” and that requires denoising. You can think of denoising as cleaning up a messy ray-traced image. In the image above, you can see a noisy image in the top-left corner. The denoising algorithm comes in and cleans up the grainy mess and leads to the image you see on the right.

Ray tracing works by taking samples of light rays for each pixel. These shoot out into the scene, bounce around, and refract, hopefully ending at a light source. They don’t always, though. These misses lead to some pixels having no information about lighting. There are ways around this.

You can take more samples per pixel, though at a detrimental cost to performance (usually in offline rendering). Or, you can add weights to a scene to make it more likely that the ray terminates at a light source. Regardless, you’ll still be left with some amount of noise that you need to clean up.

There are a lot of ways to handle denoising, usually looking at previous frames or neighboring pixels to figure out what the image is missing. However, we’ve also seen AI applied to the denoising process through Nvidia’s Ray Reconstruction. Similar to upscaling, AI is really good at denoising. You can see for yourself in the image above how much a difference AI-driven denoising makes, and without any drop to performance.

My theory — and it’s just a theory — is that the PS5 Pro is using some sort of AI-driven denoising. It’s full speculation, but I have a couple of reasons why it might be true.

The first is PSSR itself. Sony says that PSSR is “AI-driven,” which likely means that there’s an AI model running in real time on the console, upscaling your games. It’s also a feature exclusive to PS5 Pro-enhanced games, suggesting it needs specific integration like Nvidia’s DLSS  and can’t work universally like AMD’s Radeon Super Resolution.

Second is that we know that AMD is working on AI-powered upscaling and denoising with a single algorithm. The company has been forward that its next version of FSR upscaling will include an AI backbone, and its most recent published research says it’s able to do both upscaling and denoising with a single model. Further, just this week, AMD said it’s working hard to bring the next version of FSR to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, suggesting the release is right around the corner.

If these aren’t the exclusive ray tracing features that Cerny was talking about, I’m not sure what is. If correct, that would give the PS5 Pro a leg up over PCs. We have Nvidia Ray Reconstruction, but that’s only available in five games, and only at high graphics settings that GPUs as powerful as the RTX 4060 would struggle to run. Meanwhile, we already know about 87 PS5 Pro-enhanced games, and that’s before the console is even here.

Still up in the air

The PS5 Pro isn’t here yet, and even when it is, Sony likely won’t publish dense technical details about how it handles denoising. Right now, we have two dots — AMD’s research on AI-powered denoising and upscaling, and the features we know about on the PS5 Pro — and I’m trying to connect them. That doesn’t mean it’s a straight line.

It would be a very interesting application, however. Unlike a PC, where these tools are often used to get frame rates in the triple digits, a console is targeting either 30 frames per second (fps) or 60 fps. Shortcuts like upscaling and denoising show up in a different context, bringing the consoles up to par without pure hardware advantage. Even if it’s still a ways behind something like the RX 7800 XT, we know there’s a large GPU in the PS5 Pro.

Hopefully, it won’t be long until we see AMD’s AI-powered denoiser and upscaler on PC. Not only will that open up broader support in games, it’ll also give us a chance to stack up the quality against the PS5 Pro to see what’s really going on under the hood.